Death Note

Death Note

デスノート
2006 -2007 Madhouse NTV 37 episodes Completed
Psychological Thriller Mystery Supernatural Drama
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Details & Synopsis
Light Yagami is seventeen, top of his class, and bored. Not restless-teenager bored. Philosophically bored, convinced that the world is irredeemably rotten and that the people running it are not equal to the task. Then a notebook falls from the sky. Any human whose name is written in it dies. Light picks it up, reads the instructions, and within forty-eight hours has decided he is God.

This is not a villain origin story. Light does not become the thing he becomes through corruption or trauma or a single catastrophic choice. He becomes it because the notebook revealed what was already there. The horror of Death Note is not what the notebook does. It is what Light does with it, calmly, methodically, with genuine conviction that he is correct.

Produced by Madhouse and directed by Tetsuro Araki, Death Note aired on NTV from October 2006 to June 2007. Thirty-seven episodes adapted from Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata's manga. The first twenty-five are as close to perfect television as the medium produced in the mid-2000s. The remainder are contested in ways that are worth understanding before you arrive at them.

The contest is L. An anonymous detective. No last name. No visible biography. A man who sits in hotel rooms eating cake and stacking sugar cubes and holds the single largest sustained record of solved cases in the world. He is assigned to find Kira, the name the internet gives to the unknown killer who appears to be executing criminals globally through untraceable cardiac arrest. L deduces within the first episode that Kira is in Japan. By the third he has narrowed it further. Death Note's first arc is a sustained cat-and-mouse between two people who are the most intelligent persons either of them has ever encountered, operating with incomplete information, neither willing to move without certainty and both moving constantly. It is one of the great dramatic constructions of its era.

In 2006 this show was downloaded faster than Conclave-Mendoi could release it. Not by the anime community. By everyone. Death Note crossed into spaces that had never heard of fansubs, had no context for seasonal anime, had no prior investment in the medium. It crossed because the premise translated instantly, because Light Yagami is a protagonist who works on people who have never watched anime in their lives, and because L is the kind of character who produces the specific obsession that makes people talk about a show to people who were not going to watch it. The mid-2000s fansub era had no larger single crossover event.

The second arc arrives. Near. Mello. The Wammy's House succession. Whether what follows L is adequate to what preceded him is the argument Death Note fans have been having since 2007 and have not resolved. Watch and form your own position. The first arc alone justifies every minute.
Alt Title デスノート
Studio Madhouse
Network NTV
Aired 2006 - 2007
Episodes 37
Genre Psychological Thriller, Mystery, Supernatural, Drama
Status Completed
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Fansub & Scanlation History

2006–2007: NTV Broadcast, 720p MKV Softsubs & Group Rivalries

Death Note Landed in the Middle of a Format Change

XviD AVI, H.264 & Matroska During the Same Broadcast Run

Death Note premiered on Nippon TV in October 2006 right in the middle of a technical transition inside digital fansubbing. Surviving releases from the series show the older XviD-in-AVI format still dominating much of the weekly output, while later episodes also appear as H.264 encodes in Matroska containers. Kuro-Hana is a particularly clear example: several later episodes survive in both AVI/XviD and 1024x576 x264 MKV versions. The change did not happen overnight. Death Note's release history preserves both generations side by side.
[Eclipse]

Live-eviL Took Death Note to Episode 12

Then the License Ended the Run

Live-eviL released the first twelve episodes of Death Note before dropping the project after the series was licensed by Viz. The group's own retrospective describes Death Note as one of its blockbuster projects and remembers the crew as unusually female-led by the standards of the scene. Just as importantly, Live-eviL did not quietly keep going once licensing changed the situation. Twelve episodes survive as the complete Live-eviL Death Note run.
[L-E]

Toriyama's World Was Really There Too

A Scanlation Giant with a Surviving Death Note Fansub Run

Toriyama's World is better remembered for manga, but surviving Death Note release files prove that the group also worked directly on the anime. The archive contains TW-tagged releases across the opening stretch of the series, including episodes 1 through 8 and 10 through 12, while AniDB independently records a twelve-episode Death Note project. The files carry Toriyama World branding and IRC information for #toriyamaworld on Rizon and EnterTheGame. This was not a database mix-up or a later repack. The group really did fansub Death Note.
[TW]

Three Groups Had Death Note Episode One on October 7

Desuno · Live-eviL · Toriyama's World

Death Note premiered in Japan on October 3, 2006. AnimeSuki preserves episode 1 releases from Desuno Fansubs, Live-eviL and Toriyama's World all dated October 7, with Animanda following on October 8 and several more alternatives appearing afterward. The competition visible later in the series was already present four days after the premiere.
[TW]

Animanda Nearly Made It to the End

Episodes 1–31 Survive

Animanda started with Death Note episode 1 and stayed with the series deep into its final stretch. Surviving release files run continuously through episode 31, matching AniDB's archival count of thirty-one episodes before the project was dropped. In a field full of one-episode starts and abandoned attempts, thirty-one episodes made Animanda one of the substantial incomplete runs.
[Animanda]

C1Anime Ran Beside Them for Twenty-Six Episodes

[C1] · XviD AVI

C1Anime is another release line that becomes obvious once the actual files are laid out episode by episode. [C1] releases survive from episode 1 through episode 26, mostly as compact XviD AVI files typical of the period. They never reached the finale, but for more than half the series they were one of the alternatives viewers could follow week to week.
[C1]

Everybody Wanted to Sub Death Note

A Crowded Broadcast-Era Release Field
Death Note drew an unusually crowded field of competing fansub releases during its original broadcast. Live-eviL, Toriyama's World, Animanda, C1Anime, Kuro-Hana and a long tail of smaller groups all released portions of the series, sometimes covering the same episode at the same time. Surviving files from the period make that competition visible directly: episode 1 alone survives here from Animanda, C1Anime, Live-eviL, Otaku-Fansubs and Toriyama's World. This was not one group carrying the show. It was a race.
[L-E]

Kuro-Hana Carried the Back Half

AVI and x264 MKV Versions Survive Side by Side

Kuro-Hana enters the surviving archive around episode 17 and becomes one of the dominant names across the back half of the series, continuing through episode 35. Several episodes survive twice: an XviD AVI release and a higher-resolution x264 Matroska version. That makes Kuro-Hana more than another group name in a database. Its files preserve the exact point where older AVI distribution and newer H.264/MKV releases were overlapping in real time.
[Kuro-Hana]

Even the Finale Had Competing Versions

Ruberia · Episode 36–37 · XviD and x264

By the final two episodes, the release field was still fragmented. Ruberia releases survive for episodes 36 and 37 in both XviD and x264 variants, including revised v2 files. Episode 37 also survives from the wonderfully named WWAHFDNTVFUAUAWGR in two versions. Death Note did not arrive at its finale with one definitive fan release. The competition lasted all the way to the end.
[Ruberia]

The Release Archive Is Messy Because the Scene Was Messy

The surviving Death Note fansub record is full of duplicate encodes, revised versions, groups appearing for a handful of episodes and other groups carrying long runs before disappearing. That mess is useful history. AVI and MKV releases, v2 corrections, alternate encodes and competing group tags preserve the way the series actually circulated while it was airing rather than presenting one clean retrospective release lineage.

2003–2006: Weekly Shōnen Jump & Raw Leak Scanlation Pipelines

Ohba & Obata's Shōnen Jump Debut, December 2003

Death Note debuted in Shueisha's Weekly Shōnen Jump in December 2003. Scanlation teams digitized imported magazine raws, hand-typesetting Obata's dense line art and Ohba's text-heavy strategic monologues years before official English volumes existed. A named group, Orange Tangerine (OT), is confirmed via a detailed October 2005 fan translation comparison, published right as Viz's official Volume 1 reached shelves.
[OT]

Viz Reached the Manga Before the Anime Existed

Official English Volume 1, October 2005

Viz Media began official North American publication of Death Note in October 2005, roughly a year before the television anime premiered in Japan. That changed the status of fan translations that had been circulating around the manga. Some groups in the broader scanlation scene followed a drop-on-license code, but the surviving record does not establish one universal coordinated Death Note shutdown. Orange Tangerine remains a documented example of the pre- and early-license fan translation scene.
[OT]

2007–2020s: Viz Licensing, Adult Swim Debut & Global Real-World Panics

Viz Licensed It in 2007, Adult Swim Premiere October 21

Ocean Group Dub, Vancouver

Viz Media licensed the anime, bringing it to Cartoon Network's Adult Swim on October 21, 2007, confirmed exact date. The Ocean Group dub starred Brad Swaile as Light and Alessandro Juliani as L, both confirmed accurate, airing virtually uncut in a late-night slot.

Real-World "Death Note" Bans, 2007–2010

US School Suspensions · Shenyang/Beijing Censorship
Students in the US, China, and Russia were found carrying real replica Death Notes with classmates' and teachers' names, prompting municipal bans in Shenyang and Beijing and formal school warnings across North America.

Notebook-Styled Box Sets & the March 2016 Blu-ray

Viz released 9 DVD volumes, a notebook-styled limited edition box set, and a complete 1080p Blu-ray in March 2016, securing permanent HD preservation.